Putting aside all work for once, and permitting herself a space of undisturbed leisure, she proceeded to cast up her account with love and life in as clear-headed, accurate a fashion as she would have cast up the columns of cash-book or ledger—­and found the balance on the credit side.  So finding it, she turned her head and looked across the room at the wide half-tester wooden bed, set against the inner wall—­the white crochet counterpane of which, an affair of intricate fancy patterns and innumerable stitches, loomed up somewhat ghostly and pallid through the gloom.  A flicker of retrospective victory passed across her face, attesting old scores as paid.  For there, through sleepless nights, nursing the ardours and disgust of her young womanhood, she lay barren beside her apple-cheeked, piping-voiced spouse, his wife in name only.  There later, times having, as by miracle, changed for her, she gave birth to her son.

If somewhat pre-christian in instinct and in nature, the child of a more ancient and a simpler world, she was in no sort slow of intelligence or wanton.  What had been, sufficed her.  She cried out neither for further indulgence of passion, nor against barriers imposed by circumstance and class.  That which she had done, she had done open-eyed, counting and accepting the cost.  Since then wooers were not lacking; but she turned a deaf ear to all and each.  A frank materialist in some ways, she proved an idealist in this.  No subsequent love passage could rival, in wonder or beauty, that first one; since, compared with Charles Verity, the men who subsequently aspired to her favours—­whether in wedlock or out—­were, to her taste, at best dull, loutish fellows, at worst no more than human jackasses or human swine.

And, through it all, she possessed the boy on whom to spend her heart, in whose interests to employ her foresight and singular capacity of money-making.  For love’s sake therefore, and for his sake also, she had lived without reproach, a woman chary even of friendship, chary, too, of laughter, chary above all of purposeless gaddings and of gossip.  Business, and the boy’s sea-going or returning, might take her as far as Southampton, Plymouth, Cardiff, more rarely London or some northern port.  But Deadham village rarely beheld her, and never, it is to be feared, did the inside of Deadham church.

Yet Deadham church bell plaintively, insistently tolling, the sound reaching her muted by the thickness of the fog, kept her attention on the stretch for the ensuing hour.  Startling as it was poignant, Charles Verity’s demand to see her, six days ago, brought the story of her love to full circle.  Their meeting had been of the briefest, for he was exhausted by pain.  But that he had sent, and she had gone, was unlocked for largesse on the part of fortune, sufficient to give her deep-seated and abiding sense of healing and of gain.  And this stayed by her now, rather than any active call for mourning.